Vanipedia — A Name You Won't Soon Forget

BY: FRIENDS OF THE BBT

Jan 14, SEDONA, ARIZONA, USA (USA) — Move over Wikipedia. Srila Prabhu-pada-pedia has come to stay. If you have not heard of Vanipedia yet, get ready to be excited.

The building, next door to the Radhadesh castle in Belgium, is complete. The new computers and furniture in the guest rooms are being put into place. The entire three-story building has been transformed for volunteers to retreat to its European-styled, Srila Prabhupada's teachings resort. It's free. It's relatively easy, and they train. It's Vanipedia.

So, what is Vanipedia? Vanipedia is the Wikipedia formatted website for all the scriptures that Srila Prabhupada had ever written. "What we are attempting is something Herculean," said founder and enthused worker Vishnu Murti Prabhu.

Vanipedia, broken down, is: Vani, Sanskrit for teachings and pedia being used because of its reference to Wikipedia's-fast and easy to search webpages that can be written and edited by the readers. (Just to be clear, the readers are first trained in the Vani ways before premised to writing web pages, disturbing any doubts you may have with the Wikipedia controversy.)

There are different components to the website, of which two are being worked on now: Vanisource and Vaniquotes. Vanisource is the full text of all of Srila Prabhupada's written or spoken work, including lectures, letters and conversations, whereas, Vaniquotes is the classifying and organizing of all of Prabhupada's work either in thematic, key word, or id search arrangements.

Vishnu Murti Prabhu sees Vanipedia as a solution to problems of misquoting and out of context quotes that are creating conflicts. He sees the storing and organizing of Srila Prabhupada's teachings as one of the answers that ISKCON's future is dependant upon. In a short time, he said, Srila Prabhupada's generation will not be here to share the vapu, (literally meaning body) expressed as the encounters and relationships, the photos and videos, and so the vani will be the foundation of which ISKCON will stand.

Volunteers from all over the world are already engaged in this seva (service) of the information age. One such volunteer, the lead trainer at Vanipedia, Labangalatika Devi Dasi, working in Belgium but originally from the US, said she had been searching for such a service—a service in which she could study "our philosophy while working," and in Vanipedia she found just that.

Vishnu Murti Prabhu, helped create Vedabase (a compilation of a vast majority of Srila Prabhupada's books online for academic purposes), but he said "Vanipedia outdoes Vedabase by far for many reasons."

In 1996 the project took a critical form as a non-profit based out of the Bhaktivedanta Library Services (BLS) at ISKCON Radhadesh, as a Prabhupada Vani Research Academy of which Vanipedia was developed from.

How can you become a Vaniseva-ite? It's as simple as an email, vaniseva@pamho.net. And do not forget to check out the website that you soon, too, will not be able to live without: www.vanipedia.org.

Read the complete 'Friends of the BBT' Newsletter here